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Stammers & Echoes: A manifesto

Language repeats. And repeats. And repeats. Language exhales a repetitive reality that we, as its speakers and writers, are bound to and captured by. The repetition of language is a metronome that chimes a spatial and temporal conditioning, the territorialising performance of an aesthetic experience that is unlimited yet limiting, which invades our very being. A contagious praxis that arranges a material structuring, not concerned with meaning but only its own propagation, language organises an institutionalising ideology of repetition and reproduction which denies ontological potential in deference to the finitude of possibility.

A homeostatic regime that we occupy and are occupied by, the material topology of language’s repetition appears inescapable. Caught in a loop, we are captivated by language, a conditioning that pulses and reverberates, structured by reference and deference. But if speaking is mere repeating, the stammer and the echo are a repeated repeating; procedures not of stale reproduction but of vibrant production through repetition. Using iteration against itself, the stammer and the echo present modes of transformative mediality that motivate alternative material and ontological practices in abeyance of language and its regime of reproduction.

Stammers & Echoes: A manifesto is an arts research thesis that unfolds the philosophy of repetition in language. A synthesis of Gilles Deleuze’s transcendental materialism and Jacques Derrida’s deconstruction, this text will establish ontological and material procedures for alternative patterns of repetitive speech. In developing what will be termed linguistic materialism and the determination of language as a hyperobject (Timothy Morton), the stammer and echo are proposed as itinerant (anti)methodologies that not only expose the materialism of language but are agencies that provide access to an ontological potential in excess of the possible.

This research thesis is also a manifesto; a performative document and an art object. The speculative condition of this research is embedded in the very reading and writing of this text. Repetition is deployed in the making of a rhythmic reading of research, in which circularity and reiteration manifest the material performance of a distinct spatial and temporal experience that reconfigures the difference of repetition itself. This text proposes not only an exemplar for doctoral artistic research, but a manifesto for practices and procedures to be deployed against language and other regimes or ideologies of repetition and reproduction.